As Cook's Country shares in their feature, the origin of the sonker is uncertain, but a small town in North Carolina is keeping the dish on the culinary radar with a yearly festival celebrating the dessert. (Sadly, there's little information online about the annual Lowgap Sonker Festival.)

There are variations on this dish -- which you can read about in the magazine -- but sweet potato is reportedly the most popular variety. They don't all look like the one we made. Here's a much different take on the dish that we found on Flickr. This version looks more akin to pudding:

There are things we love about this recipe. First, and this may be sacrilege to some of you, but sometimes a frozen pie crust -- which the recipe suggests -- is just what you need. Especially in the run-up to a big meal (and when we were already making a pie crust for another dessert that we'll be sharing next week), it was really nice to roll out a frozen crust and work with it. We don't always advocate for frozen, but sometimes, a boy needs a shortcut.

And it's beautiful. The lattice crust sits on top of the layered sweet potatoes, which actually reminded us so much of this Vegetable Gratin recipe that we love.

But there are other things that we found lacking. Chiefly, for a dessert, our sonker wasn't very sweet. The recipe calls for 1 cup of brown sugar for 4 pounds of sweet potatoes, which sounds substantial to us. We suspect that the level of sweetness of our potatoes themselves was the culprit. The final product -- though beautiful -- almost fell more in the savory category than the sweet. Especially up against other achingly sweet desserts (we're looking at you, Chocolate Caramel Cake), it seemed out of place.

Our other issue is that the accompanying dip didn't help. We ended up making it twice. The first time, it came out gloopy. The second time, it was thin. We're not sure where it all went wrong.

So, sonker. We like the idea, and we love the name. We just wanted to love the dish, too.